Contents - Constitutional Court of Georgia

Swamping the Lords, Packing the Court, Sacking the King. Three Constitutional Crises
But, Sir [he added ominously], the resources of the British Constitution are not wholly exhausted…
and I say with conviction that a way must be found, a way will be found, by which the
will of the people expressed through their elected representatives in this House will be made to
prevail. 20
A lot more would need to happen, however, before this threat could be made good, and Campbell-Bannerman
would not live to see the day. He died in April 1908 and was succeeded by Asquith,
who was replaced at the Exchequer by David Lloyd George. Meanwhile, the government’s programme
of legislation continued to sustain heavy damage in the Lords. 21 Merely starting on a very
important topic like Home Rule was impossible given the extremely hostile attitude of the Conservatives
and the overwhelming majority with which the Lords had thrown out Home Rule in 1893. Despite
all this, the government was unwilling to resign itself to its impotence. As early as May 1907,
Campbell-Bannerman had explained in a memorandum to the Cabinet that in his view the House of
Lords’ absolute right of veto should be replaced by a suspensive right, and a month later the Commons
adopted a motion to that effect by a large majority. Interest in this issue gradually increased
and there was public speculation about the possibility of breaking the Lords’ resistance to a ‘Veto
Bill’ by raising large numbers of Liberals to the peerage. In 1711 Queen Anne had shown how effective
this could be, and in 1832 King William IV, after much fussing and fuming, had promised
his Prime Minister Lord Grey that he would, if necessary, confer a title of nobility on eighty people
in order to guarantee the passage of the Reform Act. On that occasion, the threat alone had been
enough: ‘Rather than be swamped by Whig peers, the Lords passed the Bill’. 22
In December 1908 the government had had enough. It had been in power for three years and
had achieved very few results:
No measure, other than a money bill, had passed on to the statute book in anything like its
original form unless, on third reading in the Commons, it had secured the acquiescence of Arthur
Balfour. For three years the smallest Opposition within living memory had effectively decided
what could, and what could not, be passed through Parliament. In the language of the day, the
cup was full. 23
Nonetheless, a Veto Bill was not introduced immediately because everyone’s attention was
caught by a totally new and spectacular development, namely the House of Lords’ impending rejection
of Lloyd George’s Finance Bill introduced in April 1909, something that had not happened in
250 years. The Finance Bill, also referred to as ‘The Budget’, is not a budget in the normal meaning
of the word, but a body of tax measures, a financial plan. In those days of rising international tension
there was in Britain great concern about Germany’s construction of armoured ships, which
threatened to undermine Britain’s traditional supremacy at sea because Britain did not have these
20 Jenkins, Balfour’s Poodle, p. 44.
21 Jenkins, op. cit., chapter III, with the revealing title ‘Ploughing the Sands’; see also Nicolson, George V, p. 99 et seq., and Stephen Koss,
Asquith, 1976, Hamish Hamilton Paperback 1985, p. 84 et seq.
22 Chronicle of Britain, 1992, p. 855; Nicolson, George V, p. 130; Arthur Aspinall, Lord Brougham and the Whig Party, 1972, p. 192.
23 Jenkins, Balfour’s Poodle, p. 63.
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